


Recall: Day 1

by Confrog



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aw hell I don't know how to tag this, Extended Universe, Gen, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Rebirth of Overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-18
Packaged: 2019-03-03 07:11:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13336086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confrog/pseuds/Confrog
Summary: When Winston sent out the Overwatch recall signal, everything changed. He thought it would be just like the old days, but the world is different now and the new Overwatch will have to adapt to survive past its infancy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is written as what I'm calling "Extended Universe": this means that I have done my very best to stay inside of the written canon of Overwatch (at the time of the fic's creation). I will be jumping between the material covered in the animated shorts and the comics, often picking up the narrative directly after their events. If there's any confusion as to when something is taking place, feel free to ask me a question in the comments and I'll do my best to clear it up!

**Watchpoint Gibraltar**

**01:37**

 

   “Winston?” asked a lighthearted British voice from the bank of projection monitors in front of the armored gorilla. “Is that you, love? It’s been too long!”

   “Yes,” replied Winston, adjusting his glasses, “yes it has.”

   “Did you send out the signal I think you sent out?” asked Lena. “Is Overwatch back?”

   “Not exactly,” rumbled Winston, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment. “I mean, I think we will be, given time and effort. Just not quite yet.”

   “Where are you, love?” asked Lena, concern bleeding through in her tone. “I haven’t seen you or heard from you since Switzerland right before the Fall.”

   Winston started reply, but pulled up short. A horrible thought had popped into his head.

   “Athena, run a security diagnostic on the communications network,” he said, moving up to the console in front of the bank of projection monitors and typing rapidly. He had to double check everything, make sure they weren’t being monitored. The last thing he needed after issuing a recall signal was for every government in the world to immediately be on him because he hadn’t thought to run his communications through the Blacknet.

   “The communications channel is clear of surveillance,” replied Athena. “Would you like me to reroute all incoming calls through the Blacknet channels?”

   “You know me too well, Athena,” said Winston with a small chuckle.

   “Winston, what’s going on?” asked Lena insistently. “Who’re you talking to?”

   “Sorry, I got caught up in the moment,” replied Winston, finishing up his hastily-written Blacknet security shell program and pressing enter to activate it. “I’m at the old Watchpoint in Gibraltar, Lena, you know the place.”

   “I do,” said Lena. “I can be there in two hours. I’ve got the old subsonic personnel jet down at Gatwick, a former Overwatch mechanic there keeps it off the radar in case I need it.”

   “Lena, I have a favor I need to ask you,” said Winston, a little desperation in his voice. “Can you bring me a curry? I've been living off of fruit, vegetables, and peanut butter for the past six years. I think I’ve had as many smoothies and juice blends as I can stomach”

   Lena’s laughter across the line was a breath of fresh air to Winston; one of the things he hadn’t managed to teach Athena since Overwatch fell was how to tell a good joke.

   “I’ll pop by my favorite place on the way, love,” she said, and Winston could hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

   “There’s a clear landing space near the hangar,” said Winston, beginning to feel the bruises from his recent melee. “I’ll see you there, Lena.”

   With a small beep, Lena’s icon on the screen disappeared as the call ended. Winston turned to survey his workspace, now littered with fallen Talon agents. Sighing, he began making his way down from the balcony.

   “Athena, what do you recommend in this situation?” asked Winston, landing with a thump next to an unconscious body draped over his workbench.

   “Do you want the tactical answer?” replied Athena, her screen on the workbench coming to life as he nudged the body.

   “Might as well hear it,” he said, watching the body’s chest rise and fall slowly beneath the tactical vest it wore.

   “The purely tactical response is to eliminate all enemy operatives before they can disclose their location or any other information to Talon,” said Athena. “But I know that you will not do that.”

   “I’m not going to kill helpless people, Athena, even if they are Talon operatives,” replied Winston. “What is the status of the brig?”

   “I can activate that section of the Watchpoint, but we risk being detected if we activate any further sections,” said Athena. “Our current power usage is negligible and unlikely to show up on remote monitoring, but if we have to activate one of the Watchpoint’s backup generators, we will immediately be visible.”

   “Divert all current power to the brig until I’ve moved all of them into the cells, then lock down that section and shut off power to it,” replied Winston, hefting the first body over his shoulder. “We’ll let them stew there until we have a better solution. Even without power, the cells should have enough amenities to tide them over.”

   “Understood,” said Athena as the lights flickered and went out again in the room. “Diverting power now.”

   Winston shouldered three more of the unconscious bodies and carried them over to a repulsor-lift hand truck, dumping them roughly onto it as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He repeated the process until there was a pile of Talon agents loosely sprawled on top of each other, then he powered up the lift and started making his way towards the stairs leading down to the brig. He would strip them all down to their skivvies once he got there and have Athena run a full-body scan on them before locking down the section. Luckily, there was enough concrete between the brig and the surface that even if they managed to conceal a communication device, there’s no way they would be able to get a signal out.

 

* * *

 

   After a good hour of strip-searching the Talon strike team, Winston closed the last of them into a cell. It was good that the cells designed for mundane prisoners were designed to run on minimal power, because the high-security containment units required a constant power feed to maintain the energy barrier surrounding them. Even given proper tools, Winston thought that it was highly unlikely that the Talon agents would be able to break out of the section once they locked it down and isolated it from power. The blast doors at the section’s entrances were so thick that even a group of technicians operating high-powered plasma saws would need three to four days of non-stop work to cut through them. He’d been planning on using the brig as a panic room should he and Athena need to hunker down and hide from intruders, but it would serve its original purpose just as well.

   “Athena, initiate the lockdown,” said Winston from the stairwell, pushing the floating hand truck up the stairs in front of him. The blast doors slammed into place, hydraulics hissing underneath the enormous sound of metal impacting metal.

   “Good riddance,” he rumbled under his breath.

   “Returning power to its normal distribution,” chimed Athena. “My predictions show that the power diversion will not affect the hydroponics lab’s accelerated production cycle in any way. Your next harvest will be in nineteen days, according to my projected schedule.”

   Winston made his way back up to the improvised work area he’d set up shortly after arriving at the Watchpoint, the repulsor-lift hand truck in front of him piled high with tactical gear and guns. All of the technology was fairly standard, basic optical readouts on the helmets feeding compiled tactical information to the whole squad, aim-assisted automatic rifles, bullet-proof body armor, the works. Too bad the body armor wasn’t designed to deal with large blunt-force trauma. Winston chuckled, feeling his muscles flexing beneath his suit as he walked as well as little bursts of pain from the bruises and general soreness from the electrocution. He looked down at his forearms and noticed that the material of his unarmored bracers was slowly being soaked with blood from the shot embedded in his flesh. He grunted and made his way over to a small surgical kit open on a bench by the wall; he’d had it out for the burns he’d been getting from the micro-soldering he’d been doing on his barrier-generator prototype, but it had all the tools he needed to extract the little pieces of lead from his forearms as well.

   Winston winced as he dug the forceps into one of the tiny holes in his skin, carefully probing the wound for the lead shot embedded there.

   “You should really be utilizing the materials available in the medical bay,” said Athena, a subtle inflection of worry in her synthetic voice.

   “I’m fine, Athena,” replied Winston, closing the forceps on something hard. “I have medical training, and I can make do with the medical supplies I have on hand.”

   Winston grunted as he pulled firmly on the piece of metal under his skin, only causing more pain to shoot through his arm. He gritted his teeth and decided to do something medically unsound: he shifted his grip on the forceps and yanked the shot out of the wound. Letting out a low growl from the pain, he dropped the forceps onto the upturned lid of the surgical kit, a small, jagged piece of metal falling from them. He grabbed the antiseptic applicator and inserted the tip into the wound, wincing as the antiseptic spray stung his flesh. Swabbing off the applicator, he peered down at the piece of shot he’d removed: it had the same general shape he recognized for shotgun pellets, but it also looked like a caltrop from the Middle Ages, with spikes radiating off of the central sphere. Looking back to the wound he’d just removed it from, he could see the blood running out of the newly jagged hole in his skin.

   “Damn,” swore Winston as he used a cotton ball to staunch the fresh bleeding. “Athena, do we have access to any medical or autopsy reports in shootings attributed to Reaper?”

   “Using Blacknet backdoors to access the Interpol database,” replied Athena from her standing tablet on the worktable across the room. “There are several autopsies that show standard shotgun wounds, but upon further inspection revealed anomalous shotgun pellets embedded in the wounds themselves.”

   “It seems that I’m going to need use of the med bay,” said Winston once he managed to staunch the flow of blood from his arm. “Athena, divert the hydroponics power to the med bay until further notice, this could take a while.”

   “I’ll meet you there,” said Athena, her tablet interface shutting off with a quiet beep.

   “Thank you,” replied Winston, closing the surgical kit and placing it back on its wall-rack. Hopefully he’d have time to clean this all up before Lena got here… It had been a long time since he’d had guests.


	2. Chapter 2

**Just Outside Watchpoint Gibraltar**

**04:02**

 

   The G.P.S. in the jet’s projection H.U.D. showed Lena that she was few miles out from the Watchpoint as she placed the bag holding Winston’s curry, a beef vendaloo she’d nabbed from a twenty-four hour curry joint, into the backpack resting between her feet. She could have let the jet’s autopilot take over, but it had been long enough since she’d flown that she wanted to get used to the controls again; she had a feeling she would be making this flight a lot in the near future. She’d taken the jet out of Gatwick Airport, south of London, and made her way down along the west coast of France and Spain. She decided to take the long way around Spain as opposed to cutting across to the Mediterranean near Bilbao just to be safe. Even though she’d been keeping to the upper atmosphere, she didn’t want to risk running into anyone else along the route that might try to shoot her down since she was flying an unlicensed Overwatch model jet through international airspace.

   Lena zipped up the backpack, securing it between her leg and the side of the cockpit as she gripped the control sticks on either side of her and deactivated the engines. As the jet began to descend, she pushed the nose down into a dive towards the sea below, watching the her altitude reading decrease rapidly. Warnings flashed across the H.U.D., showing her predicted crash models, but she just gritted her teeth and waited.

   10,000 meters. Lena held the the sticks forward, getting the jet as vertical as possible in the dive.

   7,000 meters. She could feel the jet trying to spin left, so she compensated in the opposite direction just slightly.

   2,000 meters. She flexed her fingers, just watching the sea below rush towards her as the jet continued to dive.

   500 meters. Just a few moments longer…

   Lena pulled back on the sticks and fired up the energy foils, sending the jet swooping forward as airfoils made of the same energy as projected barriers formed around the wings, allowing it to glide silently across the tops of the waves. Sea spray washed across the cockpit’s windscreen, blown away by the jet’s speed as she let out a whoop fueled by raw adrenaline. Even after years of fighting the good fight, not many things could compare to the rush of pulling out of a power-free dive from the upper atmosphere. She could hear her old flight instructors screaming in the back of her head for pulling off such a dangerous maneuver even though the situation called for a stealth approach, but that only made her smile wider.

   Lena could see the Watchpoint growing larger in the distance ahead of her as the jet continued gliding over the Mediterranean, her body still singing with adrenaline. Even in the darkness, the Watchpoint was still visible in the faint lights of Gibraltar reflecting off the surface of the sea. The last time she’d flown into the Watchpoint, the whole place had been lit up like a Christmas tree with lights directing you to the hangar and landing pad as well as flood lights for the people moving between the buildings at night. Now she had to squint to see even the buildings, much less where Winston might be set up.

   The jet swept upwards over the buildings as Lena finessed the sticks to steer it towards where she remembered the landing pad being. In the soft glow of the energy foils, she could see the outline of a matte-black transport dropship on the landing pad as she fired up the landing repulsors. Its wide wings were tucked into its sides, while its access ramp sat open with red light spilling out of its hold. Winston hadn’t mentioned company, so either they’d shown up since she talked to him or that hadn’t really been Winston at all…

   Lena took the jet in several tight loops around the landing pad, but no one emerged from the unfamiliar dropship to shoot at her, so she took the jet the rest of the way down and landed it next to the dropship. She watched closely as the jet’s landing repulsors powered down, looking for any sign of movement from the dropship, but everything was still and silent. She popped open the top of the cockpit, flicking one of her pulse pistols out of its forearm holster into her hand and scanning the area as she threw the backpack over her shoulder and climbed out of the jet. As she landed next to the jet, she unholstered her second pulse pistol and kept them at the ready, ears straining for the slightest sound. When she turned her back to the dropship, she heard something billow softly behind her, and she let her instincts take over: she activated her chronal accelerator to blink forward, turning as she moved, and opened fire into the mouth of the dropship.

   The sound of Lena’s pulse pistols rang out through the Watchpoint, followed by silence. A small plume of smoke drifted out of the mouth of the dropship, and the smell of melted plastics followed. She squinted into the red glow coming out of the dropship, but beyond the vague shape of a storage case that looked like swiss cheese, there was nothing there. She could have sworn she’d heard something… Maybe she was imagining things, what with the tension of coming back to the Watchpoint alone. She wished Winston had filled her in on the details of why he initiated the recall, but she’d been in such a rush to try to get to the Watchpoint that she hadn’t remembered to ask. She had done her best to sneak out without Emily waking up, but to no avail; all she’d said to Emily was that an old friend needed to see her, but she was sure Emily had guessed what she meant. There weren’t many reasons that Lena would dress up in full gear other than to deal with something that had the potential to be dangerous.

   Lena turned her back on the black dropship, and started making her way towards the Operation Headquarters. She really hoped that Winston was the one who sent out the recall signal, and that this whole thing wasn’t some big trap designed to pull in old Overwatch agents. She missed the big guy, not to mention she owed him for getting her life back after the accident. There were so many things in her life she wouldn’t have found if it hadn’t been for him inventing the chronal accelerator…

   Lena shook her head and focused her eyes on her surroundings again. If she let her guard down and this was a setup, she would be snapped up in a second. If she got hurt or died, Emily would never forgive her. Lena readied her pulse pistols again and entered the hangar’s side door, relying on the glow of her chronal accelerator for light as she made her way through the darkened space.

 

* * *

 

   Lena saw the faint light coming from the entrance to the Operation Headquarters as she creeped closer, pulse pistols still drawn. She knew that she was hardly the most stealthy person, having a glowing blue circle projecting from her chest, but she still tried to keep the sound of her footsteps as quiet as possible as she came up to the edge of the doorway and leaned her back against it. After a quick peek, she started up the stairs just beyond the doorway, each step bringing her closer to the source of the light, which seemed to be something other than the normal lights in the Operation Headquarters based on her memories of the place. As soon as she could see above the top of the stairs, she stopped and peered around the room from her vantage point: there were work lights spread around the room, with power cables all leading back to a single outlet. She could see the silhouette of a hulking shape leaning over a table filled with what looked like electrical parts and pieces, a deep muttering coming from its direction as it fiddled with something in front of it.

   Suddenly, the silhouette froze and slowly placed whatever it was holding back onto the table with a dull clank. In one swift movement, it turned and leapt the distance between the table and the top of the stairs, towering over Lena as it let out a deep, rumbling growl that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

   “I don’t know how you got out of the--” said the enormous shape, coming to a halt just in front of her before she reflexively activated her chronal accelerator and blinked backwards down the stairs. “Lena!”

   Before Lena could blink further away, the shape moved forward and swept her up in a bone-crushing embrace. In the glow of her chest piece she could see Winston’s face, a wide smile splitting it from ear to ear as he squeezed her tightly to his chest.

   “Loosen up a little, love,” said Lena, struggling to breathe through the strength of his hug, “you’re going to squish the curry.”

   Winston carefully placed her back on the ground, still with a huge grin on his face. Now that Lena could properly see him, she could see that he was in his battle armor, but not wearing the bracers due to the white bandages wrapped around his forearms.

   “What happened here?” asked Lena.

   “I had a run in with Reaper and some Talon flunkies,” replied Winston, his face darkening when the name passed his lips. “They were here to hack the Watchpoint’s database, looking for the complete list of Overwatch agents. They almost succeeded too.”

   Winston led Lena back up the stairs into his improvised work space, looking around for a stool or something that she could sit on. He ended up picking up a metal crate, dumping the spare parts off of it with a clatter and setting it next to the work table, gesturing for her to sit with a faux serious bow. She laughed and hopped up onto the crate, swinging the backpack off her shoulders and opening it to reveal the plastic bag holding the curry. Even just the smell of lukewarm curry wafting from the bag set Winston’s mouth to watering.

   “Are you ok?” asked Lena, pulling some plastic utensils from the bag and placing them, along with the curry, on the table in front of Winston. “What happened to your arms?”

   Winston  immediately pulled the curry container towards himself and began devouring its contents. After a few moments of slurping and mildly uncomfortable moans of gastronomic pleasure, Winston paused, straightened his glasses and turned back to Lena with an awkward smile.

   “Apologies, I ran out of spices in the first year I was here,” said Winston, wiping a stray bit of beef vendaloo from the side of his mouth with the back of his hand. “As to my arms, I took a few blasts from Reaper’s shotguns in the fracas. I had to remove the pellets myself once I’d dealt with the situation; they were nasty little things, spikey all over like a plant burr, but made out of lead. Required a minor bit of surgery to get them all out, nothing to worry about.”

   “Winston!” exclaimed Lena, noticing little dots of red beginning to bleed through the layers of gauze and bandage on Winston’s forearms. “I’m gonna worry about it if I bloody well feel like it. It’s a shame we don’t have Angela around to take a look at you. That staff of hers would have had you fixed up in no time.”

   “I had hoped to hear from her by now, actually,” said Winston, a mixture of concern and disappointment crossing his face. “I’d hoped to hear from many more people, but you’re the only one so far.”

   “Cheer up, love,” replied Lena, “it’s got to be a big shock to most of them, a signal coming from Overwatch. They may have moved on, or simply just haven’t heard it yet since you sent it at bollocks o’clock, you great lump.”

   Lena punched Winston gently in the arm, feeling it give a little bit more than she remembered; the years had been hard on all of them, it seemed. He chuckled, rumbling deep in his chest.

   “Maybe I set my expectations a little high,” said Winston, seeming to brighten slightly. “It is just the first day.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for giving this fic a read, I really appreciate it. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments, and drop me some kudos if you enjoyed it! It lets me know that you would enjoy seeing more of it and helps motivate me to keep working.


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